Modern social organization produces distance through mediated action and intermediaries

Evidence

The accomplishment of modern weaponry can be taken as a metaphor for a much more diversified and ramified process of the social production of distance. John Lachs has located the unifying characteristics of the many manifestations of this process in the introduction, on a massive scale, of the mediation of action, and of the intermediary man – one who ‘stands between me and my action, making it impossible for me to experience it directly’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 551

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Lachs’s ‘intermediary man’ — a defining concept for the chapter’s theory of mediated action.
• XREF: connects to: Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 98; Social forms can be classified by the interpersonal distances they create — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 81; Agency relationships drive social differentiation and bridge exchange distances — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 18 (+5 more)

Related

• Mediated action hides outcomes from the actors who commission it (similarity 0.83)
• Social relations are constituted through mediating processes (similarity 0.82)
• Agency relationships drive social differentiation and bridge exchange distances (similarity 0.79)
• Mediation makes latent distance between parties explicit and measurable (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Agency relationships drive social differentiation and bridge exchange distances #expands (0.88) — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 18
• Social forms can be classified by the interpersonal distances they create #expands (0.82) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 81
• Space-binding media create communities dispersed across distance rather than place #exemplifies (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 623
• Trusting agency relationships enables complex social organization. #expands (0.78)